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Sonia M. Ospina, Faculty Co-Director

Sonia M. Ospina, Faculty Co-director
and Professor of Public Management and Policy

Sonia M. Ospina, PhD, is RCLA Faculty Co-director and a Professor of Public Management and Policy at NYU Wagner. A sociologist by training, her academic interests include leadership, engaged scholarship, and democratic governance. She is the author of Illusions of Opportunity: Employee Expectations and Workplace Inequality (1996), and numerous referred journals and book chapters.

Over the past seven years, Professor Ospina has directed RCLA's Ford Foundation-sponsored multi-year, national research project on social change leadership in the United States. RCLA partnered with 90 social change organizations to produce new knowledge about how their practice of leadership contributes to deepening democracy. This research has been transformed into 18 practitioner booklets, 33 leadership stories, at least ten peer-reviewed articles -- and will culminate in a book.

Sonia also explores governance and accountability issues associated with public management reform in Latin America, co-editing Outcome Evaluation for a Modern and Democratic Public Management: Latin American Experiences (2003) and Managing Intergovernmental Relationships: Latin American Experiences (2002), both in Spanish. A recent project on the impact of leadership development programs for local public servants in Colombia has also opened the door to substantial research on this important yet relatively undocumented facet of leadership.

Professor Ospina earned her PhD in Sociology and a Masters in Public Policy and Management from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.